My journey began not long before my fifty-eighth birthday. I was, at the time, a morbidly-obese infrastructure engineer with a software vendor in Milton Keynes, a city in England. I was living a rather humdrum existence, working, playing video games, sleeping, working, and doing not much else with my life. All of my material wealth was tied up in some stocks and business ventures I’d taken some risks on earlier in my life, but the sum total of my material wealth I had to my name consisted of a single-bedroom apartment near my workplace, a mediocre car, and little else.

I had no family, immediate or extended, apart from parents I had long ago stopped talking to and cared nothing for, a deceased brother, a younger sister who thought and behaved the same way my parents did (and who I therefore wanted nothing to do with). The only one who was left alive that I would miss was Dani, the one who moved to Canada to pursue a new life, and who I had heard met a new girlfriend. I had lost contact with her a few months before I came into contact with Synergy Nanotechnology Solutions, a company that would ultimately change not only my existence, but that of every single person across the planet.

It all started when I came across an article discussing nanotechnology in medicine, and I immediately contacted my financial advisor so I could invest in the company. It wasn’t a great deal of cash, certainly not enough to change their fortunes, but it did put me on the radar of the company CEO, who took me on a tour of their facilities in the south west of England. It was there I met with the people managing the experiments with nanotechnology in the country, and it was there, I was given the opportunity to test the technology to see what it did for health outcomes of people with varying medical conditions.

I did not know it at the time, but I had developed a particularly lethal form of cancer that might have killed me years ago, but ultimately made me eligible for participation in long-term testing of the nanotechnology. Having already become a part of the programme, I was administered with a small number of the devices, and within a week, my cancer had been almost obliterated.

It was then, I was suggested for a month’s cryogenic suspension to monitor how the nanotechnology worked in ultra-low temperatures on patients who needed to be frozen to preserve their bodies. I accepted, and was put into a capsule to be frozen for a brief period of time.

Only it wasn’t so brief.

Forty-three years had passed by the time I was awoken, and that had only been because my cryogenic pod had lost power, and my nanotechnological machines decided I needed to wake up. It didn’t take me long to realise that the entire world around me had undergone some sort of apocalypse, with collapsed buildings, abandoned residences, and very little sign of civilisation where I was at the time.

I also had the opportunity to get an inventory of my state of health, and was astonished to learn that I had not only been cleared of all medical conditions that I had suffered from, but I had been de-aged to the physical and aesthetic age of someone who was in their mid-twenties.

Becoming a young man again was a surreal experience, but it was one that had proven critical to my survival in the new world, as I traversed it, in an attempt to try to find out what was happening.

After speaking with a local, I was informed that the overwhelming majority of the populace had been wiped out, some by adverse reactions to improperly programmed knock-offs of the nanotechnology I now carried, some through electromagnetic incidents, many through outright violence, and the vast majority through open warfare. The survivors numbered in the millions instead of the billions, and it left an eerie sense of emptiness in the local area.

I needed to try and find a place in the world, so after securing some supplies and learning about how the local currency worked, I set off for Milton Keynes, in an attempt to recover some data from my old place, then decide what to do next. Along the way, I learned how my nanocloud worked, what it did to maintain my state of health and youth, and ways in which I could augment my abilities through data collection and nanocloud upgrades that could be performed through the interface it provided me, and which would be executed by the nanites swarming my body full-time. Throughout my journey, I would learn that the nanocloud had near-limitless possibilities, even though I could only make small changes in the beginning.

I managed to get into the company offices for Synergy, recover some data about test participants, and learned that I was far from the only person who had been cryogenically suspended as part of the trials. I needed to find these people to learn more, and maybe warn them.

I was captured close to home, interrogated, and then to my mind, I was intentionally let go through an engineered escape. I nonetheless used the opportunity to process the data I had managed to retrieve, so I could start warning people about what had happened, and that they were now targets. One thing that had become clear to me in my travels, was that England (and possibly the rest of the UK by extension) had become a cesspool of opportunists, thieves, parasites and predators. What little civilisation existed before the collapse of society had been flushed down the toilet, no doubt thanks to the government of the era, so I decided I had nothing left to stay for, and departed for the continent.

After an initially frosty reception across the channel, I was allowed entry into France, whereupon I began a journey to find the people on my list. The continent was in far better shape than England was, and while the streets felt largely empty compared to when I grew up, most people still held on to their civilised lives. Eventually, after meeting several participants, I was directed to meet Laurent, an interesting man who was ostensibly responsible for trying to rebuild local society in his home city. Initially, I disliked him, because of the abundant wealth he possessed and the opulence of his property, but I learned quickly that I misjudged the man. He introduced me to his wife Aline, and his daughter Eveline, who was part of an underclass of hybrid people engineered specifically for either servile work, foot soldiers or pleasure creatures, but who had escaped young, and worked very hard to become a lethal fighter in her own right.

She also didn’t like me very much.

For a reason I didn’t understand at the time, her father insisted she travel with me, ostensibly so she could learn how to interact with and be civil to a human being without either being openly hostile to him or having to learn to trust him fully. It came as a complete and total surprise to no-one, when this didn’t happen. I made the assumption that she had been a spoiled princess, that her disdain and aloofness had been ingrained thanks to never having been denied any luxury I assumed her parents had granted to her.

I would later learn just how wrong that assumption was.

She saved my life that first day, when a silver wolf attacked me, and had demonstrated I didn’t know how to fight worth a damn. She also berated me heavily for putting out some powerful pheromones that I had no control over, especially as I found her martial prowess so intoxicating as I watched her defeat the attacking wolf.

It took time, but eventually I was brave enough to ask her to teach me how to fight. She was not only a skilled fighter, but a somewhat impatient, if effective teacher.

Then we both met Lena, a human woman who travelled with two fox companions, and joined us on our journey. Lena also made it abundantly clear that she was interested in me sexually. I did not know why this infuriated Eveline at the time, but it drove a wedge between us, and the situation exploded one night when Eveline demanded I explain why I preferred Lena over her.

I didn’t. Prefer Lena, that was.

The tension was so thick, it could only end one way that night, as Eveline and I retired to her room to explore and relieve the tension. It was going very well, until I said something that I did not know at the time was traumatic to her, and it caused the atmosphere to deteriorate rapidly, resulting in my being asked to leave.

Feeling sorry for myself, and being not just a little bit drunk from imbibing earlier that night, I had far less self-restraint, and so when Lena visited me that night, I accepted her proposition with little argument, ending up in the two of us blowing off our own steam. This caused me two problems.

One was my nanocloud, which began to act strangely, and only when Lena was present. I wouldn’t learn why until later.

The other was Eveline, who was furious with me for sleeping with Lena, and who I was furious with for berating me for doing so, when she had rejected me and thrown me out of her room beforehand. It did not help matters between us, and Eveline and I stopped talking to each other. The tensions this caused in the group were palpable, but for some reason, Lena delighted in this. I would learn why much later.

Within two days, our feud would come to a head, as Eveline demanded I answer her questions about a diversion we were taking to help a small town on our route. I refused to do so, going on an admittedly-poor tirade about her behaviour that ended up infuriating her to the point she had threatened my life, physically attacking me and pinning me to the ground. The others removed her from me, and I sent her away.

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I believed at that moment, that I would never see her again, and felt terrible. Lena didn’t like this, and told me that I should forget the person who had tried to kill me.

Our defence of the town went well, despite the incompetence of one of the commanders of the defending forces stationed in the town at the time, and we moved on to our next stop, as I looked out for the next person on my list. As we travelled, Lena continued to proposition me, and I gave in, feeling lonely and remorseful of what had happened between Eveline and myself.

When I called Laurent on our arrival at Hanover, he told me more about what Eveline had dealt with, and advised me of something he referred to as Imprinting, a behaviour deliberately programmed into the DNA of all hybrids as a means of ensuring their loyalty. I would go on to learn more about this in the future, but it explained a lot about Eveline’s disdain and aloof behaviour, and I asked Laurent to apologise to her once she arrived home.

With that difficult conversation concluded, I went on to look for my next contact, only to find that he had been mauled to death by what had looked like a fierce predator with claws. I began to suspect that someone had somehow obtained data on my target list, and was picking them off before I got to them. It didn’t help that I was also being followed by an assassin-like person who was never still long enough for me to get a read on who they were.

Rushing to Berlin to prevent the next person on my list from being murdered, I arrived at their location to find that their dwelling had been abandoned on a hurry. One of the foxes departed suddenly, while Lena rounded on me and demanded to know how I had managed to tip her off.

I hadn’t.

But the confrontation told me everything I needed, that Lena was a traitor, and that she must have been responsible for the events that had led to at least one of my contacts being murdered, and Eveline and I becoming at odds with one another. As she threatened to kill me for the information on the missing contact, she impaled one of the fox companions in the chest with one of her throwing daggers when he attempted to intervene, but failed to account for the assassin type who had followed us. After a tense battle, the assassin killed Lena in a rather vicious fashion, and then revealed herself to me.

It was Eveline, who had followed us, and who had been responsible for spiriting away the last remaining contact, taking her to safety and obtaining important information. She also revealed that the female fox companion was in league with Lena. He insisted I give Eveline another chance, and died shortly afterward. I took his words to heart.

The following morning, after a heart-to-heart about our last confrontation, I made a call to her adopted father's residence, where I had a chance to speak to her friend Amélie. Briefly, I explained our situation without giving anything away that might betray Eveline's trust, and Amélie suggested meeting up to help me with an idea I had about her nanocloud. We would meet in Hamburg.

Eveline and I then travelled to Hamburg, to board a ship to Iceland on a trip to Canada, to try to pick up on my personal mission. Amélie and Philippe, her bondmate, had joined us there. Eveline's reaction was fierce. It took Amélie to react in an uncharacteristic fierceness of her own in order to get Eveline to listen to us. Amélie then explained her arrival as a coincidence (in reality, she was meeting with me to test a few ideas of mine regarding nanotechnology and imprinting behaviours). Eveline and I joined them for the evening, before we retired for the evening, where Eveline and I got into another disagreement over how I was being submissive to her tempers and how it was making her angrier because that wasn't how she wanted me to behave. I pushed back and told her I needed to deal with it in my own way and do what I felt was right. Strangely enough, she accepted this explanation, and we seemed to reach a sort of truce after this.

That night, Amélie came to me, explaining that Eveline had come to her, concerned that she might be pushing me so hard that I might just reject her and send her away again, a thought that had not occurred to me since before arriving at Rheda-Wiedenbruck in the weeks before.

While in Iceland, despite some disagreements, we continued on our trip, until we had closed in on Reykjavik.

As I had learned to do regularly, I monitored my nanocloud for issues, kicking off upgrades that would come in useful, including trauma treatments, physical upgrades that would increase muscle-mass and dermal protection, and hardware upgraders that increased my ability to interface with electronic devices, store data and kick off calculations so my brain didn't have  to.

On our journey, we were attacked. I'd let my guard slip somewhat in my frustration with Eveline and her continued frostiness toward me (which had thawed a little, though not quickly at the time). This had led me to being injured severely, putting my life in danger, and had revealed Eveline's concern for my well-being in ways neither of us was quite ready to admit to ourselves or each other.

This inner conflict of Eveline's, while I was only marginally aware of it at the time, had caused her to behave strangely the night we reached Reykjavik and put up at a local hotel for the night. I was tired, injured and not in any mood for anything other than to sleep, so her advances had not been welcome. My reaction resulted in an emotional response I hadn't expected, before she fled to her own room for the night.

While on our trip to Canada, we finally reached an understanding and found a sense of peace with each other. It wouldn't last.

When we disembarked at Mary's Harbour, I made a brief call to Laurent to confirm our arrival, whereupon he asked me to divert to a location in Toronto on my way to New York. After the call ended, I went to my hotel suite to clean up and work on my nanocloud project. It was then I was greeted by a persistent visitor who had almost refused to take no for an answer to her propositions for inappropriate sexual gratification, and it was then, I discovered Eveline had engineered this encounter in an effort to have me act in a way that would get her to hate me. Instead, the whole subterfuge had been blown open when the subject that had been tasked with enticing me into bed had admitted her part in the plot, just as Eveline had tried to stop it from happening and to talk to me.

I'd never felt so betrayed in my life, despite my previous experiences in the old world or my abusive ex partner. My reaction was incandescent fury and an expression of pain I couldn't get a lid on. I told Eveline I was leaving, and I left her collapsed on the floor of my hotel room in despair as I stalked my way out of there, putting as much distance as I could between us.

I'd come across a xenophobic incident while stopping in Sept-Iles, whereupon some hybrid canines were being attacked by humans in the area. I intervened and was greeted by a grateful father and daughter, a situation that had touched me deeply at the time. It nonetheless encouraged me to keep heading west, which I did until I encountered a residence in the coordinates I'd been given.

I met the residents. Rosalie, someone I had never met before, though I'd heard of her second-hand, and Danielle Reyes, my sister.

Our reunion was emotional, as was my own expression of pain over what had happened over the previous weeks. I also explained I was on a self-tasked mission to find out what had happened to the world, and I would be leaving the following morning to continue to New York. Both my sister and her wife had made me promise to keep in touch, which I did. I then headed south.

As I left the local town where my sister now lived, I was attacked by an obsidian panther who was fast, cunning and lethal. I would have been easily defeated despite my nanotechnological enhancements had it not been for none other than Eveline, who had struggled to keep up with me on my trek west, and who had been near-mortally wounded defending me. The obsidian panther had swaggered toward me in triumph, only to have his head blown apart by a sniper round. I soon discovered it was Rosalie, who had military expertise from her past in the Canadian forces. Both she and Dani had taken us back to town to seek treatment for Eveline, who was now only alive thanks to emergency intervention my nanocloud had prompted me to give. It saved her life at the cost of temporarily reducing my nanocloud density, and hence, its capabilities.

My sister. having examined Eveline with a unique ability of her own, then insisted I take a look at what she discovered. Transferring to my mind what she had learned, my sister then allowed me to experience Eveline's life from an early age, and it did much to explain her actions since we met. It all made sense, and I was well on my way to forgiving her.

When Eveline finally awoke, we set aside our differences and finally expressed our feelings for each other. I extracted a promise from her never to betray my trust again, which she gave without hesitation. Our frostiness was now at an end. The following morning, I'd gifted her with the project I'd been secretly working on, an imprint management system that would allow her to decide how and when she wanted to control her natural imprinting tendencies. Her reaction, though enthusiastic, was somewhat marred by the fact that she was still badly injured despite the additional nanocloud units I'd gifted to her that were speeding up her recovery process.

In the following days as she continued to recover, we bonded, first mentally, and finally, physically. This began our regular routine of spending nights together, and had the unexpected side effect of giving us the ability to sense each others' feelings. She continued to be Eveline, terse and stoic in public, reserving her true side for private moments.

Eventually, we had to move on. I still needed to get to New York, though I was beginning to doubt my mission's point when there were so many other things happening at the time. Nonetheless, after another emotional goodbye to my sister and Rosalie, we continued travelling south.

Once we reached Middlebrook in the USA, we made a call to Eveline's parents. At that moment we discovered that a breeding facility similar to one that had bred Eveline and so many others like her had been operating in New Salem, Massachussets, and that we had been asked to link up with some forces there. We set a brisk pace to the airfield just outside of New Salem, and met with a local contact, who surprisingly was one of the Synergy contacts I'd encountered on my list from Milton Keynes. To our surprise, Amélie and Philippe were also present, and for the first time, I'd met Caitlynne, their third bonded partner.

Our plan was to infiltrate the compound as buyers for some of the hybrids they were getting ready to sell, to get an idea of the layout, then send it back to Amélie and Philippe, who would lead a force of locals to rescue the locals.

Our mission was successful, but in executing it, I'd made two harrowing discoveries. The first was that the people who had captured me in Milton Keynes was part of the same group who were deploying and funding these breeding facilities, and the second was the "failures", hybrids who had been rejected at varying stages of their young lives as "unsuitable". It was both traumatising and fuelled a desire in me to end this barbaric practice.

I was now all-in on Eveline's father's mission.

Once we'd settled the survivors and seen to their needs, Eveline and I resumed our journey south to New York, so that I could gather more information on what had happened.

It is here, we continue our journey.